Reflections On The Bases: A Woman Tries To Understand

By Jan Lugibihl

Images of Olongapo

For three and a half years, from 1984 to 1987, I lived in Olongapo City in the Philippines, site of the U.S. Subic Naval Base and home of 12-16,000 hospitality women (prostitutes) and 3,000 street children. Some of those women and children became my friends and images of them and their lives stay with me even after a year back in the U.S.

I am in a bar that feels like home to me, the Hole in the Wall—a descriptive name if there ever was one. I am talking with some friends when Maria, the two-year-old who lives there, is brought downstairs. Maria's mother is one of the hospitality women who works in the bar. Everyone watches over Maria—the women and men who work in the bar, the vendors on the street, the sailors.

When someone plays a song on the juke box, everyone says, "Dance Maria, dance," and she does, showing off as two-year-olds do. Maria dances and plays while sailors get drunk around her, while men and women pair off before leaving to have sex, while others return and sit together kissing and touching each other. Maria dances for the Americans around her, men who look like the father who is no longer in her life. Dances to "We are the world/We are the children."

Maria's face merges with Gloria's. I met 12-year-old Gloria when she was selling plastic bags in the market in Olongapo. She lives across the river from Subic Naval Base in one of the 500 shanties built on Olongapo's garbage dump.

Then one night a year later, I saw her on the street leading from the main gate of Subic Naval Base. She was wearing make-up and a frilly dress. She said she and her friends were selling gum to the American sailors who were on leave.

A few months later, another 12-year-old street child named Rose went with a tourist who was attracted to Olongapo by stores he'd heard about what was available there. This man net Rose, took her to a hotel room and inserted a vibrato into her body. When the vibrator broke apart and became stuck inside her, he left Rose to die.

The last time I saw Gloria before I left Olongapo she hid from me. She was embarrassed because she's selling more than gum to American sailors now. The man who killed Rose has been caught but I fear others like him will go to Olongapo and I fear Gloria may meet one of them.

When I think of Gloria, I wonder if someday her life will be like my friend Mila's. Mila arrived in Olongapo a few months before I did. She left her rural province when she was 16 because she wanted to get a job on the Navy base and send money to her family who are 70% of Filipinos who life below the poverty line. Since she did not know anyone who could help her get a job on the base, Mila went to work in a bar.

Her first customer, an American sailor, abused her, then complained to the AMerican who owned Mila's bar that she would not do everything he wanted her to do. The bar owner believed the sailer, gave him his money back, then fined Mila the total amount, about $25.00. Since Mila had no money she became indebted to the bar owner.

Six months later, after going with another sailor, Mila became pregnant. By the time she realized she was pregnant her boyfriend was gone on his ship. Mila knew she would be forced to quit working when her employer discovered she was pregnant, so she tried to abort the child. She went to a practitioner of herbal medicine, drank the medicine she was given, jumped rope. Nothing worked.

Two days after Christmas when Mila went into labor the city hospital refused to admit her until she gave them money. They said, "We know what your work is and that the father of your child is an American. All Americans are rich, so we know you have lots of money."

While her friends were out trying to borrow money, another doctor decided to admit Mila. He delivered the baby without giving Mila any anesthetic. The baby, a girl, was stillborn.

Mila had no choice but to return to work in her bar because now she had hospital and doctor bills to pay.

And I remember Julie, wanting desperately to get out of Olongapo, but feeling trapped there. It is another evening, in another bar. I spend the evening talking to Julie who is 30 and has been in Olongapo for 2 1/2 years. She left her home in Mindanao because she is the oldest child in her family and she wanted to help pay for her younger brothers and sisters to go to school. Her parents are farmers and because they do not own, the land they till and the harvests have been bad they won money to their landlord and cannot support their family.

Julie did not plan to go to Olongapo, but now she is here and she knows she cannot go home because her family would be very angry if they knew what she is doing. What she really wants now is to be a nurse. Instead, she is a cashier in a bar.

Being a cashier means she receives a regular salary and can to go with a man only when she wants to. She has gone with one man a year, choosing older sailors because "I'm not very good in bed and that doesn't matter to them as much as it does to younger men."

As the evening progresses, she tells me something she had told no one except her best friend. The last man she was with, an older sailor, was very nice to her and promised many things. He said he would give her money to open a small store to support her until her business was established.

A few months earlier he sent her a check for 5,000 pesos. Few people in the Philippines have checking accounts, so a local dentist agreed to be her guarantor. Julie cashed the check, sent some to her family and spent some on food. A few later the dentist came to her and said the check had bounced.

Now Julie is working extra hours so she can pay back the money she spent as well as continue to support herself day to day. She had written to the U.S. address the man, who is no longer in the Navy, gave her but has received no response.

She says, "Sometimes now I wonder if I shouldn't just go with every man who asks me and not trust anyone again. Now I tell other women, if he says he'll marry you, say 'Do it first, then I'll believe you."

Illusions? Life Near A Military Base

The young American sailor comes off the ship. He has been on that aircraft carrier with 6,000 other men for three months. He walks through the gate and crosses the bridge leaving Subic Naval Base behind him. He is heading for Olongapo's strip—over 500 clubs and its estimated 15,000 "hospitality women" (prostitutes).

He sees himself as macho, entitled to whatever his powerful American dollar can buy—beer, a souvenir T-shirt, a women, the illusion of intimacy for a night for less that 15 American dollars. He has heard about Olongapo from the men on his ship who have been here before. He has heard their stories of sexual prowess.

Even if he is scared, he thinks he must try to make his own memories of this place. He is over 10,000 miles from his home in the midwestern United States. No one there will ever know what he does here unless he tells them. For one night he can live under the illusion that he is desirable to any beautiful woman he chooses. He can forget that it is only his money and the hope of going to America as his wife that makes him attractive to the women.

The younger Filipina sits waiting in a bar. It is late afternoon—no sailors there yet. She has been in Olongapo for just two days. She came from the southern island of Mindanao, leaving her one-year-old daughter behind with family. There are no jobs in her village. She is here under the illusion that a sailor will marry her and take her to his home in the United States. She thinks then she will be rich. His mother will accept her. Her family will believe she was a maid or a waitress when she met her boyfriend in Olongapo.

The older sailor comes to the bar. He has been coming to Olongapo off and on for five years. He has been drinking for four hours already, so his illusions are almost gone for this day. The pain is closer to the surface. "All of us are lonely," he says. "All of us. We just want someone to talk with."

He compares what he is doing in the Philippines to the time he spent in Vietnam during the war. Then and now he is helping to keep a country—and world—safe from the Russian. Another beer and he says that after 16 years in the service, all he knows how to do is kill people. He claims he has dealt with his experiences in Vietnam, but as he talks of choking a man and beating his head against the floor in his last bar fight, violence seems very close to the surface.

He says that now sometimes he feels like the real choice for him is between God and country, a choice he mostly tries not to think about. His illusions began to evaporate the day he left Vietnam and know the villagers who had lived near his company might be killed as American sympathizers as soon as his unit was gone.

The older hospitality woman sits in her bar. Her illusions, too, have faded. An aircraft carrier has just left, so now there will be a long time with no customers, no money. She has no illusions about fitting back unto her family anymore. She is no longer attractive as she once was, and now other younger women are often chosen instead of her.

She has faded pictures of many men she has known, and carries her memories of others in her head. Even now one American claims he wants to marry her, but she is no longer so sure she wants to leave the Philippines. She knows women who have gone to the United States, then returned to work in the bars of Olongapo when their marriages failed.

Soon she will be too old to have the child she wants. She knows she is just one among thousands of hospitality women—really no different from any other.

Olongapo City. A city of illusions and pain. The lights flash and the music blares. Sailors and women pass each other on the street, sit in bars looking at each other, trying to choose the one who will make their illusions become reality. Each uses the other to ease the pain and to keep the illusions alive.

—Jan Lugibihl